100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club.

Branding one’s self in an online environment built on entropy and go-baby-go is difficult at best, and impossible if you forget to take your happy pills. To that end, I’ve come up with a quick list of 100 things you might do to help with these efforts. Feel free to add your ideas to the comments section.

If you like this one, please don’t hesitate to stumble, blog, digg, bookmark, and otherwise promote the hell out of this. That’s another tactic, by the way. : )

Listening

Build ego searches using Technorati and Google Blogsearch

Comment frequently (and meaningfully) on blogs that write about you and your posts

Don’t forget the conversations hiding in Twitter (use Summize.com) and Friendfeed. Be sure to stay aware of those.

If you can afford it, buy professional listening tools, like Radian6 or others in that category.

Use Google Reader to store your ego searches.

Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see who’s linking to your site.

Use heat map tools like CrazyEgg to see how people relate to your site.

Listen to others in your area of expertise. Learn from them.

Listen to thought leaders in other areas, and see how their ideas apply to you.

Don’t forget podcasts. Check out iTunes and see who’s talking about your area of interest.

Track things like audience/community sentiment (positive/negative) if you want to map effort to results.

Home Base

Home base is your blog/website. Not everyone needs a blog. But most people who want to develop a personal brand do.

Buy an easy-to-remember, easy-to-spell, content-appropriate domain name if you can. Don’t be TOO clever.

A really nice layout doesn’t have to cost a lot, but shows you’re more than a social media dabbler.

Your “About” page should be about you AND your business, should the blog be professional in nature. At least, it should be about you.

Make sure it’s easy to comment on your site.

Make sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your site’s content.

Use easy to read fonts and colors.

A site laden with ads is a site that doesn’t cherish its audience. Be thoughtful.

Pay attention to which widgets you use in your sidebar. Don’t be frivolous.

Load time is key. Test your blog when you make changes, and ensure your load times are reasonable.

Register your site with all the top search engines.

Claim your site on Technorati.com

Use WebsiteGrader.com to make sure your site is well built in Google’s eyes.

Passports

Passports are accounts on other social networks and social media platforms. It’s a good idea to build an account on some of these sites to further extend your personal branding.

Twitter.com is a must if you have a social media audience. It also connects you to other practitioners.

Facebook and/or MySpace are useful social networks where you can build outposts (see next list).

Get a Flickr account for photo sharing.

Get a YouTube account for video uploading.

Get a StumbleUpon.com account for voting.

Get a Digg.com account for voting, as well.

Get an Upcoming.org account to promote events.

Get a del.icio.us account for social bookmarking.

Get a WordPress.com account for its OpenID benefits.

Get a LinkedIn account for your professional network.

Take a second look at Plaxo. It’s changed for the better.

Get a Gmail.com account for use with reader, calendar, docs, and more.

Outposts

Build RSS outposts on Facebook. Add Flog Blog, and several other RSS tools.

Build a similar outpost on MySpace, if your audience might be there.

Make sure your social media is listed in your LinkedIn profile.

Add a link to your blog to your email signature file (this is still an outpost).

Be sure your social network profiles on all sites has your blog listed, no matter where you have to put it to list it.

Make sure your passport accounts (above) point to your blog and sites.

Use social networks respectfully to share the best of your content, in a community-appropriate setting.

Promotion

Use Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Google Reader to drive awareness.

Promote others even more than you promote yourself

Bragging isn’t useful to anyone besides your own ego

Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people

Don’t digg/stumble/link every single post. Save it for your very best

Another promotional tool: guest blog on other sites

Another promotion tool: make videos on YouTube with URL links

Another promotion tool: use the status section of LinkedIn and Facebook

Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.

Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it.

You probably have some great ideas to add to this. I’d love to hear what you want to add, or feel free to blog your own list and add value to the project that way. In any case, I hope this was helpful, and I wish you great success in your efforts to brand yourself and show the world what a rockstar you are.

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.